


Redemption

by anoyo



Category: X/1999
Genre: F/M, Post-Series (anime)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-01
Updated: 2009-12-01
Packaged: 2017-10-04 02:49:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anoyo/pseuds/anoyo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you're fighting the battle for the end of the world, fighting just to keep on living for one more day, it's not the little things that keep your attention. You focus on the bigger things, the soul-defining things. The "this is life or death," "I know that I love you, and I would die for you," and "this will make or break us" things. As long as you can live to see another day, you've made a small victory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Redemption

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by [Zanzou](http://zanzou-chan.livejournal.com)! Written for day 15 of my 25 Days of Christmas, for [Arashi](http://efeitokaminari.livejournal.com)! I surprisingly enjoyed writing this, despite having never written the pairing before. I don't know if it really met the prompt, but I _think_ it did, and I tried my darnedest. Originally posted [here](http://anoyo.livejournal.com/156556.html#cutid6).

When you're fighting the battle for the end of the world, fighting just to _keep on living_ for one more day, it's not the little things that keep your attention. You focus on the bigger things, the soul-defining things. The "this is life or death," "I know that I love you, and I would die for you," and "this will make or break us" things. As long as you can live to see another day, you've made a small victory.

You don't plan for the "after," because it's all you can do to plan for the _now_. If you start to believe in the after, you might simply be filling yourself with false hope, and to fall from the heights of false hope is so much more painful than to fall from the flat land of here and now.

What happens, then, in the after? You base your relationship on the ultimate, the "I'd die for you," and you dismiss the little things. When you're afraid that either one of you could die in the next day, whether or not you eat the same kind of cereal makes no difference whatsoever.

In the after, strange things begin to matter. Things like compatibility, longevity, and routine -- all things that you never thought you'd need to consider.

Sorata knew that he loved Arashi -- had known it since the day he met her, when it was imperative to _know_, with no time for consideration. He knew that he loved her more than he should, and that he would give his life for hers.

What Sorata didn't know was _how_ to love Arashi. How to be what she needed, day after day, when the fate of the world no longer rested on their shoulders.

They shared pain: a pain that no one who hadn't lived through the End of Days could ever understand. They shared an aching, complete love, that was enough to get them by for at least a year, after it all ended.

Then they had to learn to share everything else.

Arashi had lived her life as a shrine maiden: she was used to surviving on the essentials, the non-material things. She was used to a sort of serene solemnity that fed on tranquility and solitude. Sorata could be tranquil, and he could be solitary, but he could not thrive on them. Their first real fight, with all the bells and whistles, was about the need for silence, sometimes, and distance.

With help, they worked that out, and the fight after that, and after that.

Without the end of the world telling them "do or die," the threads that held their relationship together began to fray. Neither had ever had the time, or circumstance, to learn to live with and for another person. They were unsuited to it.

No matter their love for one another, no matter how all-consuming and destined it was, they were doomed to failure if they could not learn to live as the rest of the world did.

That learning, that knowledge, could only be obtained within the sphere of the normal world. Together, they existed outside that world. Only separately could they enter it, and begin to understand.

Only separately, could they learn to be together.

When they parted ways, they said it was to learn to come together once again.

They grew, learning to live in the outside world. They grew into a man and a woman who could understand the people whose lives they had saved. They grew into the man and woman that they might have been, had that great destiny not weighed upon their shoulders throughout their adolescence.

They grew into people who could coexist with the world.

When Sorata found himself laughing, with friends, at a rookie mistake during a local baseball game, he knew he'd found the normalcy for which he'd been searching.

Arashi found her own in the seats of an old, European theater, watching a musical rendition of Romeo and Juliet and wiping tears from her eyes.

The phone call to bring them back together, the letter that said, "I think I've learned," never made it to either doorstep.

To grow is to learn. To learn is to change. Love exists, among and between these things, but it cannot always triumph.

Fear, that change would destroy that love, that change would make him into something unappealing, that change would make her into someone for whom sacrifice was unnecessary, dropped the phone back onto the hook, the letter into a bureau drawer.

Change had brought with it fear of the ordinary. Perhaps, with time, it would bring courage of the ordinary, as well. Love could linger; love could wait.

It would remain when all was ready.


End file.
